Expert Novice
Member
Hello everyone, I've been doing a bit of reading on the site for a few days so thought I'd register and say hi.
I have a little previous experience with Linux but only to a very basic level. I tried playing with dual booting Ubuntu (I think it was v10.xx or something) on my windows 7 equipped HP laptop quite a while ago. My enthusiasm for breaking away from Ms tyranny was soon dampened when I ran into issues with which I'm sure many here will be familiar. The screen brightness control didn't work and was set to full and the cooling fan seemed to run at full speed all the time so consequently the battery would struggle to last any more than 20 mins or so. It might have been ok if I hadn't ever wanted to run on battery and was happy to wear sunglasses to counteract the excessive glare but after a lot of messing around trying to find drivers that might address the issues I realised perhaps my HP machine was not the best arena in which to display Linux at its best. When running Win7 it did everything I wanted it to and not wanting to spend money on a new machine I lost interest in Linux.
The old faithful laptop is now over 10 years od and still works reasonably well but has developed an issue with the screen which will necessitate spending money to remedy so rather than spend it fixing such an old machine I thought I'd be better putting it towards something more up to date and Linux friendly. Hence I have found my way here in search of info on suitable hardware and education into the ways of Linux.
From my reading so far I can see there's a wealth of good info here so I'll keep reading and post back again when a plan for a laptop/distro combination begins to form. I'll welcome advice and opinions on my choices and will be happy to post up and let everyone know how they work out. Hopefully it'll help someone else arriving here in a similar position in the future.
See you soon
I have a little previous experience with Linux but only to a very basic level. I tried playing with dual booting Ubuntu (I think it was v10.xx or something) on my windows 7 equipped HP laptop quite a while ago. My enthusiasm for breaking away from Ms tyranny was soon dampened when I ran into issues with which I'm sure many here will be familiar. The screen brightness control didn't work and was set to full and the cooling fan seemed to run at full speed all the time so consequently the battery would struggle to last any more than 20 mins or so. It might have been ok if I hadn't ever wanted to run on battery and was happy to wear sunglasses to counteract the excessive glare but after a lot of messing around trying to find drivers that might address the issues I realised perhaps my HP machine was not the best arena in which to display Linux at its best. When running Win7 it did everything I wanted it to and not wanting to spend money on a new machine I lost interest in Linux.
The old faithful laptop is now over 10 years od and still works reasonably well but has developed an issue with the screen which will necessitate spending money to remedy so rather than spend it fixing such an old machine I thought I'd be better putting it towards something more up to date and Linux friendly. Hence I have found my way here in search of info on suitable hardware and education into the ways of Linux.
From my reading so far I can see there's a wealth of good info here so I'll keep reading and post back again when a plan for a laptop/distro combination begins to form. I'll welcome advice and opinions on my choices and will be happy to post up and let everyone know how they work out. Hopefully it'll help someone else arriving here in a similar position in the future.
See you soon
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